Sunday, June 28, 2009

Tail end of June Madness

An old Chinese song once sings the loneliness and emptiness that one feels after glamor and applause received. As all busyness of June madness finally enters its tail end, both relief and a tint sense of void settle their way in.

Life goes through such an interesting cycle - sometimes it's nothing more than months of mundane rhythm and work routine yet suddenly disrupted by events and surprises, whether long-waited or unexpected, good or bad. While work increased its load by folds this month visitors from abroad also come on board one after another. A message left on facebook by a Thai friend met during junior-year abroad in Kyoto suddenly lent me a chance to sip wine and nibble finger food on top of marunouchi building. Part of the conversation went like this - "No, I'm not dating and I'm seriously considering freezing my eggs ..." "You what? Freeze what?" "Yah, my eggs. But of course, they are VERY EXPENSIVE." 5 years ago had gone by since I saw her last.

Then another out-of-town guest who once was my 4th-year Japanese classmate also showed up out of the blue and announced that he is going to start his Ph.D. degree. "Ph.D.? Geez, when I first met you you were merely a frosh in college and now you're entering academia like me while my title/status has remained the same. " Is it he who has grown or just that I have not progressed much further?

Sometimes you don't see the effect of the elapse of time on you until you see the effect of that onto others. I continue to discover new wedding/bridal shower/baby shower news not via email or mail but via updates on facebook. I see myself having a second of confusion when spotting a familiar yet unfamiliar name on facebook, only to realize a second later that it was the change of last name (of course always on the woman's end ever) that puzzled me. Or I receive occasional updates/newsletters in email and that grayish/black a ultrasound picture of a hard-to-figure image shocked me at first to realize I am seeing a new life in front of me, via the computer screen.

2 weeks ago I was sitting in the theater watching 「60歳のラブレター」and one scene could not leave me for days. After a disastrous dinner at home with her date and his teenage daughter, the female novelist protagonist sat on her garden patio overlooking the Tokyo city in glimmering night lights and just chain smoked. Then, she went inside, lay on the couch, put on her headphones, and just went into deep thinking, with 2 bottles of red beside her.

But to me, she is メチャクチャモテる. A woman whose intellect, sensibility, and humor could jump onto pages and transform themselves to beautiful words and phrases that move the hearts of millions.

But do those things need to come at the expense of personal happiness? Or does a woman's intellect and sensibility have to be a thing to be afraid of than adored? A soul that wrestles with the hardness of life yet yields not an inch to such hardness something of trouble than treasure?

The upside of all is that all 3 couplehood end on a good note at the end. In reality, though, how many stories could end on a good note before it's too late?